Astral Codex Ten

Pirate Wires

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Pirate Wires

Article

Pirate Wires is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 16, 2023 and March 06, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Pirate Wires recently reported that transgender and bisexual people were more likely (20 - 25%) to report Long COVID”; “I learned from Pirate Wires that CDC data show bisexuals were about 50% more likely”; “Pro-tech-industry newsletter Pirate Wires finds that 20 out of 21 California tech billionaires interviewed were “developing an exit plan”“. It most often appears alongside ACX Survey, 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, ACX legal and economic analysis team.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 16, 2023
  • Last seen: March 06, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Why Do Transgender People Report Hypermobile Joints?
March 16, 2023 · Original source
Pirate Wires recently reported that transgender and bisexual people were more likely (20 - 25%) to report Long COVID compared to cisgender and straight people (~15%, yes, all these numbers are really high and you shouldn’t exactly believe them). There are lots of possible confounders, and I’ll post a replication attempt from the ACX survey data sometime, but a pretty plausible explanation is that some Long COVID is psychosomatic, all forms of neurodivergence correlate with each other, and so bi and trans people will report more of every psychosomatic condition.
Inline links: Pirate Wires recently reported
But Long COVID is maximally easy to psych yourself into thinking you have - it’s just fatigue - and Ehlers-Danlos is pretty hard. And Pirate Wires was able to find 1.25x relative risk for bi people and Long COVID, and Najafian found 132x relative risk for trans people and EDS. Also, many trans people are able to easily demonstrate skin/joint abnormalities that are obvious to anyone who looks at them - although it’s possible this is selection bias - a subgroup who have real EDS (at the same rate as cis people) and are very salient because of their gender identity, while cis people with EDS (and trans people with psychosomatic EDS) don’t talk about it as much.
Replication Attempt: Bisexuality And Long COVID
May 03, 2023 · Original source
I learned from Pirate Wires that CDC data show bisexuals were about 50% more likely than heterosexuals to report long COVID.
Inline links: Pirate Wires
SEIU Delenda Est
March 06, 2026 · Original source
Some people propose that it could decrease state revenues overall even if it passed, if it drove out enough billionaires, though others disagree. Pro-tech-industry newsletter Pirate Wires finds that 20 out of 21 California tech billionaires interviewed were “developing an exit plan” and quotes an insider saying that “if this tax actually passes, I think the technology industry kind of has to leave the state”. Even Gavin Newsom, hardly known for being an anti-tax conservative, has argued that it “makes no sense” and “would be really damaging”. The ACX legal and economic analysis team (Claude, GPT, and Gemini) doubt the direst warnings, but agree that the tax is of dubious value and its provisions poorly suited to Silicon Valley. On one level, it’s no surprise that California, a state full of bad socialists, is considering bad socialist policy. But I think this is the wrong perspective. This proposition isn’t being sponsored by some generic group of Piketty-reading leftists. It’s the project of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) a union of mostly healthcare workers. This immediately clarifies the debate about whether it’s net negative for revenue. 90% of the revenue from the tax is earmarked for health care. So even if it’s net negative for the state, it isn’t net negative for the health care budget in particular, ie for the people who are sponsoring the measure. But we can get even more conspiratorial. The SEIU is known in California political circles for pioneering and perfecting the art of extortion via ballot initiative. Their usual strategy goes: Propose a ballot initiative that will sound nice to voters, but which is actually deliberately designed to ruin some industry.
Inline links: propose, disagree, finds, has argued, doubt